Presence: Stories

  Later, he wondered why making love to her under the stream of water was so easy and straightforward, while earlier, covered as she was with his words, the very thought of it was like penetrating thick brush and thorns. He wished he could have discussed this riddle with Lena. But of course that was out of the question, although he was not convinced it should be.

  After he had helped dry Carol off, she slipped into her panties, bra, and blouse and yanked up her skirt while he sat at the desk and opened a drawer and took out a checkbook. But she immediately touched his wrist.

  “It’s all right,” she said. Her damp hair bespoke their intimacy, the fact that he had changed her.

  “But I want to pay you.”

  “Not this time.” An open shyness passed over her face at this perhaps unintended suggestion of her wish to return. “Maybe next time, if you want me again.” And then she seemed alarmed by a new thought. “Or will you? I mean, you’ve done it, right?” Her earlier brashness was returning. “I guess you can’t have a first time twice, right?” She laughed softly, but her eyes were imploring.

  He stood up and moved in to kiss her goodbye, but she turned away slightly and he landed on her cheek. “I guess you’re right,” he said.

  A certain hardness surfaced in her face now. “Then, look, maybe I’d better take the money.”

  “Right,” he said. Reality is always such a relief, he thought, but why must it come with anger? He sat down and wrote a check and, with a twinge of shame, handed it to her.

  She folded the check and stuck it in her purse. “This has been quite a day, hasn’t it!” she yelled, and let out one of her horselaughs, startling him, for she had left off laughing like that since their initial moments as strangers. She’s gone back to hunting deer now, he thought, and slogging through the tundra. After peeking out of concealment for a self-confident moment, she had scurried back in.

  With Carol gone, he sat at his desk with his manuscript before him. Eighteen pages. His unfocused stare, his freshly washed body and spent force seemed to clarify and elevate him. He laid his palm on the pile of paper, thinking, I have dipped my toe over sanity’s edge, so this had better be good. He rubbed his eyes and began to read his story when from far down below he heard the front door slam shut. Lena was home. Home with her face deeply wrinkled like a desiccated overripe pepper, her mouth drawn down, her breasts flat, the hateful brown nicotine smell on her breath. He was getting angry again, filling up with hate for her stubborn self-destruction.

  Turning to his story, reading and rereading it, he felt a terrible amazement that its sweet flood of sympathy and love for her was thriving in him even now, almost as though a very young and unmarked man had written it, a man imprisoned inside him, a free-singing poet whose spirit was as real and convincing as the waves of the sea. What if he tried to turn the story into a kind of paean to her as she once had been—would she recognize herself and be reconciled? As he read, he saw how perfectly beautiful and poetic she still was in some buried center of his mind, and remembered how merely waking with her in the mornings had once filled him with happiness and purpose. Looking up from the manuscript to stare out across the barren rooftops, he felt a pang for Carol, whose brutally young presence was still vibrating in the room, and he wanted her to return maybe one more time so that he could write on her tight skin again and perhaps dredge up some other innocent thing that might be shivering in the darkness inside him, some remnant of love so terrified of coming out that it seemed to have disappeared—taking with it his art.

  The Turpentine Still

  I

  That winter in the early fifties was unusually cold in New York, or at least seemed so to Levin. Unless at thirty-nine he had prematurely aged, an idea he secretly rather liked. For the first time in his life he really longed to get away to the sun, so when Jimmy P. returned all tanned from Haiti he listened with more than sociological interest to his rapturous report of a new democratic wind blowing through the country. Levin, rather ahead of his time, had come to doubt that politics ever really changed human behavior for the better, and apart from his business, had turned his mind to his music and a few exemplary books. But even in his more political past he had never quite trusted Jimmy’s enthusiasms, although he felt warmed by Jimmy’s naïve respect. A former Colgate wrestler with a flattened nose and sloping shoulders and a lisp, Jimmy was a sentimental Communist who idolized talented people, some of whom he represented as a publicity man, as well as Stalin and any individual who showed signs of flaunting whatever respectable rule happened to be in play at the moment. Rebellion to Jimmy was poetic. The day of his seventh birthday his heroic father had kissed the top of his head and left to join a revolution in Bolivia, and he never really returned except for some unexpected visits lasting a couple of weeks until he disappeared forever. But a fossilized shred of expectancy of the man’s reappearance may still have lurked in Jimmy’s mind, feeding his idolatrous bent. What he admired in Mark Levin was his courage in having quit his job at the Tribune to take over his father’s boring leather business rather than editorialize with the new anti-Russian bellicosity demanded of him. The truth, however, was that Levin’s mind was on Marcel Proust. During the past year or so Proust’s books had crowded very nearly everything else out of his thoughts except for his music, his cherished combative wife Adele, and a comforting hypochondria.

  Haiti, for Levin and Adele, was the dark side of the moon. What they knew of the place had been gleaned from their dentist’s National Geographics and the Carnival photos of wild-looking women, some strikingly beautiful, dancing in the streets, and Voodoo. But according to Jimmy, an inexplicably sophisticated outbreak of remarkable painting and writing was taking place now, exploding like a suppressed force of nature in a country ruled for generations by knife and gun. Jimmy’s old friend, former New York Post columnist Lilly O’Dwyer, would be eager to welcome the Levins; she had moved down there to live with her expatriate mother and knew everybody, especially the new young painters and intellectuals who were trying to insinuate leftist democratic reforms before being murdered or run out of the country. In the last election, the opposition candidate, his wife, and their four children had been hatcheted to death in their street-level parlor by parties unknown.

  The Levins were eager to go. Their last winter vacation—an endless five days on a Caribbean beach—had sworn them off such brainless self-indulgence, but this promised to be different. The Levins were serious people; in an era before foreign films were shown in New York, they joined a society devoted to showing them in living rooms, and Mark especially was full of passion about the French and Italians. He and his wife were both accomplished classical pianists and in fact had first met at their piano teacher’s home, she arriving for her lesson as he was leaving, and were immediately drawn to each other’s unusual height. Mark was six four, Adele an even six feet; their pairing had normalized what they had borne as a kind of deformation, even if it still sprinkled a defensive irony over their conversations. Mark would say, “I’ve finally found a girl into whose eyes I can look without sitting down.”

  “Yes,” she would add, “and one of these days he’s going to decide to look at me.”

  Adele’s face under her bangs and short-cropped hair had an almost Oriental cast, her black eyes and wide cheekbones squinching up her gaze, and Mark had a long, horsey face and dense kinky hair and a shyly reluctant laugh, except for the days when, muttering in despair, he once again believed that his stomach had tragically dropped or that his heart had shifted slightly toward the center of his chest. Still, beneath a guarded irony they could be naïve enough to be swept up, at least at a discreet distance, in one or another idealistic scheme for social improvement. Eating lunch in his Long Island City office, he read The New Republic with an occasional dutiful glance at The New Masses and drank his milk sometimes coursing over Remembrance of Things Past in the French he loved only a little less than his music. They flew to Port-au-Prince in the roa
ring cabin of a Pan American Constellation, both of them fending off the premonition that the trip was fated to be one more bead on the string of their mistakes.

  The O’Dwyer house, finished the year before, hung like a rambling concrete nest over Port-au-Prince’s harbor. Designed by Mrs. Pat O’Dwyer and son-in-law, Vincent Breede, in her version of the Frank Lloyd Wright spirit, the house induced breezes to blow freely through its wide rooms and windows. Mrs. Pat was at the moment in deep concentration in a poker game with Episcopal Bishop Tunnel, Commander Banz of the United States heavy cruiser anchored in mid-harbor, and the Chief of Police, Henri Ladrun. Around them a vast Oriental carpet spread out to white walls covered with a Klee, a Leger, and a half-dozen brightly colored Haitian paintings, the latter testimony to Mrs. Pat’s taste and acumen, their prices having skyrocketed since she had bought them well before Haitian painters had begun to sell. She had quickly taken a liking to Adele this evening, sharing anger at right-wing Congressmen and Republicans in general for instigating the current hunt for Reds in government, a specious slandering of liberal New Dealers in her view, and for being the party of the infamous Senator McCarthy.

  Jimmy P. had primed the Levins about Mrs. Pat before they left New York. Starting out as a social worker in Providence, Rhode Island, she had early on concluded that what her mainly Catholic clients needed most were condoms, which at the time were under-the-counter items where they weren’t illegal. Carrying boxes of them up from New York where she bought them on consignment, she graduated into becoming a distributor and finally opened a plant to manufacture them, ultimately acquiring great wealth. On vacation in Haiti, she perceived an even greater need for her product here and started another factory, this time donating the largest part of the production to nonprofit organizations. Nearing eighty now, handsome as ever with flowing silver hair and a blue-eyed gaze as placid as a pond, Mrs. Pat had a life that consisted of trying to make people get to the point. Impatience had converted her from Catholicism to the Christian Science that she interpreted as a faith in self-reliance, thus expressing her personal entrepreneurship and, in its larger application, her goal of a socialist, caring society.

  Stretched out on a chaise near the card table reading her three-day-old Times, her daughter, Lilly said, “Jean Cours saw Charles Lebaye on the street yesterday.” Defeated in her battle with weight, Lilly wore flowing white gowns and negligees. Locally made tin bracelets tinkled on her arms. Her eye had caught the entry of her eleven-year-old Peter, child of her first marriage to an alcoholic New York theatre critic, and she couldn’t help thinking he had his father’s dreaded black Irish moodiness and handsome elegance. Peter, in dirty tan shorts and barefoot, was stuffing his mouth with cherries out of a fruit bowl and not deigning to acknowledge her greeting, taunting her, she thought, for depriving him of his father.

  Mrs. Pat hardly glanced up from her hand. “Saw Lebaye the Commissioner?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I thought he died a week or so ago.”

  “He did.” The card game stopped. Vincent and Levin came in from the balcony to hear, and all the players turned to Lilly. “Cours saw him in his casket and attended the burial.”

  “How could he know it was Lebaye?”

  “He’s known him all his life. He says he went up to him on the street but he walked right past him. He’s been turned into a zombie, he says.”

  “What’s a zombie?” Adele asked, turning to Vincent, who as a black Jamaican was likely to know.

  Vincent said, “A kind of slave. They claim to resurrect a dead person and draw out his spirit so he does whatever the capturer wants.”

  “But what is it really?” Levin asked, towering over the card table and feeling his carotid artery with his index finger to test his pulse.

  “I don’t know, I think they possibly drug the victim and pretend to bury him . . .”

  “Cours swears he saw him going into the ground,” Lilly said.

  “He may have seen a casket going in, dear, but . . .” Vincent said.

  “Some very strange things do happen,” the bishop interrupted. All turned to him as the most experienced with Haitians, having converted a few as well as promoting the new painting and writing in the country. The whitewashed interior of his large church was covered with fresh pictures. With his melon-shaped pink face he had a pleasantly incompetent air, but he had sheltered revolutionaries and duped men with guns looking for them. “I’m not at all sure drugs are involved,” he said. “They have a way of getting at the core of things, you know. I mean it’s more like a kind of deep hypnotism that gets them to the center of a person.”

  “But they couldn’t have actually buried the man,” Commander Banz said, “he’d have suffocated.” Black-haired, with a flawless profile, his white naval uniform with its standup collar perfectly fitted around his neck, he looked more the militant priest than the overweight bishop. Patriotically disagreeing with everything Mrs. Pat believed about U.S. imperial skulduggery, Banz found her a superior woman, an elegant mystery waiting to be solved. In any case, this house was the only place on the whole island where he felt welcome.

  “Unless they had a way of slowing down his metabolism,” Vincent said, “but I don’t believe any of it.”

  Chief Ladrun, a short two-hundred-and-ninety-pounder whose belly seemed to start below his chin, was the only Haitian in the room. With a contented laugh he said, “It’s all nonsense. Lots of people resemble one another. Voodoo is a religion like all the others, except there is more magic of course. But recall the loaves and fishes and the walking on water.”

  The conversation turned to magic, the game picked up again, and Lilly went back to her paper. Vincent and Levin returned to the balcony, where they sat side by side facing the harbor. Vincent, the only black man Levin had had the chance to talk to since his basket-shooting afternoons at college, was impressive to Levin. He knew by now that starting out as a poor, powerfully built Jamaican, Vincent held degrees from Oxford and a Swedish university and was in charge of the UN agency for reforestation of the Caribbean area. And Levin felt rather pleased by Vincent’s open interest in him and his fascination with Proust.

  “Is Voodoo serious?” Levin asked.

  “Well, you know the saying—Haiti is ninety percent Catholic and a hundred percent Voodoo. My personal view is that it’s more of a nuisance than anything else, but I think all religion at bottom is a means of social control, so I can’t take its spiritual side too seriously. This country needs scientists and clear thinkers, not magicians. But I suppose like anything else it has its good uses. In fact, I’ve used it myself.” He tended to excuse any assertion with a chuckle.

  He had arranged for a planting, he explained, of several thousand fast-growing trees, charcoal being the basic fuel here. Hardly a year later the small seedlings had all been cut down and carted off for burning. “After I finished being outraged,” he said, “I happened to be at my barber’s one day and he suggested I look up the local houngan, who might help. I found the guy; for a donation he arranged a ceremony to make the planting area sacred. A big crowd showed up to watch the planting, and nobody bothered the sacred trees for three years until they were properly harvested. I must say I hated the idea but it did work.” After a moment’s silence he asked, “Why are you interested in Haiti?”

  “I didn’t know I was,” Levin said, “but there’s some kind of atmospheric attraction, a kind of secrecy, maybe. I really don’t know.”

  He looked at the black man’s face in the glow of yellow light from the living room, and with the dark waters of the harbor beyond him and the sparse lights of the impoverished city below, the strangeness of his being here struck him, and with it an apprehension, like finding himself over his head swimming in the sea. He enjoyed his safety but longed for the risks of an artist rather than the waste of his daily wrangle with business. “I hop along solidly on one foot, the other suspended over a cliff,” he once
said to Adele after they had finished a Schubert duet that had moved him almost to tears.

  “Would you and your wife like to see more of the country? I have to go up into the pine forest tomorrow.” Vincent faced him, a thick-shouldered man in his thirties, infinitely confident and at ease in this black country.

  Eager to see into this strange place, Levin instantly agreed, surprised by the shock of anticipation he had almost forgotten was still alive in him. Proust’s beloved face flashed across his mind, like a dead flower, he thought.

  II

  When Adele saw the tiny Austin in the driveway of the Gustafson Hotel she begged off, preferring to spend the day sightseeing in town rather than sitting sideways for hours in its backseat. Actually, she planned to wander around the hotel for a while; its unremodeled French colonial style reminded her of a sunken relic. Through its tall, gauzy curtained windows she could imagine Joseph Conrad passing by or sitting in one of the lobby’s enormous rattan chairs, and there must be some shops that Mark would have no patience for. She waved happily at the departing little car.

  As the Austin moved past her, the early sun was still low enough to flood her amused face under her wide-brimmed, black straw hat; it was a soft light that seemed to elevate and suspend her in space, and Levin reprimanded himself for not making love to her more often. What was it now, a week? Maybe longer. A quiet alarm sounded in him. Tossing their ironies and sage observations back and forth was no substitute for horned clashes such as he had in business, and he resolved to begin trying to get to know Adele again. Seven years into their marriage, and they had lost a lot of curiosity. He had to stop hiding himself. He had to start listening again.

  Vincent threaded the car down the town’s main streets and around telephone poles that drooped broken wires, some of them planted like distracted afterthoughts in the middle of streets or a few feet from a curb, some on the sidewalks. Overhanging second stories shaded the interiors of shops open to the street, in most of which men seemed to be repairing pots, car fenders, broken furniture. An enormous store on one corner sold tires, stoves, refrigerators, meat, fish, dresses, boots, kerosene, gas. The bank’s windows were spotless, and through them Levin saw young women cashiers in starched white blouses working solemnly at what were no doubt the best jobs in town. A couple of neatly dressed, unsmiling businessmen stood on the sidewalk, hands clasped in a dignified morning handshake. There was still time for everything here.